"A colorful, likable setting: a crowded port city so well-drawn that readers soon feel they could walk through it..." —Publisher's Weekly

"Fresh and compelling tales." —Science Fiction Review

"...fast-paced entertainment as well as an exercise in shared-world fiction." —Fantasy Review

"Beautifully written, with detailed characterizations, the short stories are amazingly well integrated...a collection of quality fiction...Liavek is a place worth visiting. Get there before another volume comes out." —Voya

"For a world conceived in the 1980s, Liavek was notably forward-looking... As a counter to the default whiteness of fantasy at the time, Liavekans are dark-skinned, as are the indigenous S'Rian people on whose older town the city was built. A same-sex relationship is central to some of Dean's stories, and the city has multiple religions, but also atheists — no easy feat when the various gods regularly take an interest in human affairs." —Elizabeth Graham, NPR

Thursday, November 24, 2016

It’s sad that you’ve appropriated King to argue that identitarianism is civil rights. Two things he said may illustrate the problem:

“In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.” — Martin Luther King

“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” — Martin Luther King

Left-identitarians prefer the King of 1963 to the later King who spoke more bluntly about justice. They fail to note that the 1963 Dream speech was given at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, not the March on Washington for Racial Respect. To democratic socialists like King and Bayard Rustin, fighting racism and sexism were just part of what socialists do. That’s no different for the most famous democratic socialist in the US today, Bernie Sanders.

King’s unfinished project, the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, was not the Black People’s Campaign. He wanted poor people of all hues to march together and call for Basic Income to end poverty for everyone.

But left identitarians only want to fight racism and sexism. If you doubt this, notice how many of them denigrate the white working class.

And if you ask for specifics about how they can fight racism and sexism alone, their solutions are vague. They have to be vague because wealth in the US will always be disproportionately distributed without a solution like Basic Income. Which is why Malcolm X was right when he said, “You can’t have capitalism without racism”.

The history of left identitarianism in the US begins after King died. Privileged black academics in the Ivy League under the guidance of Derrick Bell developed Critical Race Theory as an alternative to King’s universalism. One of Bell’s students, Kimberle Crenshaw, coined “intersectionality”, but her intersection was only about race and gender — the black bourgeoisie is no more interested in the working class than the white bourgeoisie. Later thinkers have tried to add class to the identitarian intersection, but the problem is class is not a social identity. It’s an economic identity, and very few poor people want to preserve their identity as poor people.

ETA

On Facebook,David Hajicek said,

Will, I don't quite get the second paragraph. I can see that capitalism is good at creating poor people. And as you noted, poverty is not unique to blacks. So why, “You can’t have capitalism without racism”?

I answered,

Because generational poverty from our history of chattel slavery and wage slavery means the class system will look much like it does today without a huge change in the way we distribute wealth: disproportionately black, Hispanic, and American Indian at the bottom, with large groups of poor whites in places like Appalachia and the Dakotas, and disproportionately Jewish and Asian at the top, with large groups of rich whites in the places where the rich gather.

Interestingly (to me, at least), the distribution of white people in general is not as disproportionate as anti-racists think. A while back, Walter Benn Michaels noted, "White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those in the bottom quintile."

David said,

Or is it because racism is a useful too to get poor whites to accept their unfair circumstances?

I said,

It is, but I think most capitalists really would like to see an end to racism so they could feel that capitalism was fair. They just don't want to redistribute the wealth to do that, so we're stuck in this situation where capitalists talk endlessly about diversity and never offer anything that will actually help the people at the bottom of the pyramid.

ETA 2

Marcus H. Johnson, the author of the piece that inspired this post, responded to my comment with

There are plenty of socialist countries where Black people are at the bottom of society with the least money, the fewest resources, and the least power. Socialism =\\= antiracism. Not even close.

I replied,

I notice that you don’t name any examples of those countries, but I agree that many countries still have a problem with racism.

A few relevant facts:

During the height of Jim Crow, the Communist Party USA took up one of the most famous court cases of the day when they defended the Scottsboro Boys from charges of raping two white women. CPUSA also ran black candidates for office when segregation was the law of the land—James W. Ford was their candidate for Vice President three times.

W.E.B. Du Bois, who first wrote about white skin privilege, was a member of the Communist Party. He said in the foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of Souls of Black Folk, “I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.”

Famous black people who didn’t join a communist party but worked with communists and attended some of their meetings include Rosa Parks, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson.

That said, I agree that socialism =/= anti-racism. Derrick Bell had no interest in socialism; he liked being at the top of the US’s class system. So he took a different path than King and Rustin and Malcolm X and Rosa Parks did when he began developing Critical Race Theory.

Back in 2000, I wrote a story in Harper's about the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama, whose stated mission is to combat disgusting yet mostly impotent groups like the Nazis and the KKK. What it does best, though, is to raise obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of those groups; hence the SPLC has become the nation's richest “civil rights” organization. The Center earns more from its vast investment portfolio than it spends on its core mission, which has led Millard Farmer, a death-penalty lawyer in Georgia, to once describe Morris Dees, the SPLC's head, as “the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement” (adding, “I don't mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye”).

When in 1978 the Center's treasury held less than $10 million, Dees said the group would stop fund-raising and live off interest when it hit $55 million. As he zeroed in on that target a decade later, Dees upped the ante to $100 million, which the group's newsletter promised would allow it “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising.” At the time of my story seven years ago, the SPLC's treasury bulged with $120 million, and the organization was spending twice as much on fund-raising as it did on legal services for victims of civil-rights abuses–yet its money-gathering machinery was still running without cease.

It's still going. Last week, a reader sent me the SPLC's 2005 financial filing with the IRS, which is required by law for charities. In five years, the SPLC's treasury had grown by a further $48 million, bringing its total assets to $168 million. That's more than the annual GDP of the Marshall Islands, and has the SPLC rapidly closing in on Tonga's GDP.

Revenues listed for the 2005 filing came to about $44 million, which dwarfed total spending ($29 million). Of that latter amount, nearly $5 million was spent to raise even more money, and over $8 million was spent on salaries, benefits, and other compensation. The next time you get a fund-raising pitch from the SPLC, give generously—but give to a group that will make better use of your money. Like Global Witness.

Since the Bakkers aren't as famous as they were, I'll note for young readers that Jim and Tammy Faye were notorious televangelists.

Sadly, a couple of the original articles on the Southern Poverty Law Center's profiteering are behind paywalls:

...How about attacking the roots of southern poverty, and the system that sustains that poverty as expressed in the endless prisons and Death Rows across the south, disproportionately crammed with blacks and Hispanics?

You fight theatrically, the Dees way, or you fight substantively, like Stephen Bright, who makes only $11,000 as president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights. The center’s director makes less than $50,000. It has net assets of a bit over $4.5 million and allocates about $1.6 million a year for expenses, 77 percent of its annual revenue. Bright’s outfit is basically dedicated to two things: prison litigation and the death penalty. He fights the system, case by case. Not the phony targets mostly tilted at by Dees but the effective, bipartisan, functional system of oppression, far more deadly and determined than the SPLC’s tin-pot hate groups. Tear up your check to Dees and send it to Bright, (http://www.schr.org/)

I suppose I'm disappointed because I thought they were too smart to believe the reason the Rust Belt voted for a black president in 2008 and 2012, and for a Jewish socialist in this year's primaries, but not for a rich white neoliberal in this year's election, is racism. I'm not sure whether they believe the black Rust Belters who stayed home or voted for Trump are also racist.

White voters cared even less in 2016 then in 2012, when they also didn’t care; most of that apathy came from white Republicans compared to white Democrats, who dropped off a little less. Voters of color, in contrast, continued to care – but their care levels dropped even more, by 8 points (compared to the 6 point drop-off among white voters). Incredibly, that drop was driven entirely by a 9 point drop among Democratic voters of color which left Democrats with only slim majority 51% support; Republicans, meanwhile, actually gained support among people of color.

During the Presidential campaign of 1988, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was asked, “How you are going to get the support of the white steelworker?” He replied: “By making him aware he has more in common with the black steel workers by being a worker, than with the boss by being white.”

For people who don't get how that applies to this election, the Clinton camp ignored both black and white workers in the rust belt, and as a result, her support fell with both black and white workers.

ETA 5: Fairfax County, USA | Jacobin: "Hillary Clinton won rich suburbs in record numbers. But her campaign failed to mobilize workers of all races."

Trump did surprisingly well among groups he was thought to have fatally offended. He got 8 percent of blacks (Mitt Romney got only 6 percent in 2012), 29 percent of Latinos (Romney got 27 percent), and 41 percent of moderates (Romney also got 41 percent). Trump trailed Clinton among women by 12 percentage points, but that wasn’t much worse than Romney, who lost them by 11 points. Trump also got 31 percent of voters who said they hadn’t been born as U.S. citizens. These figures complicate the theory that racism and sexism carried Trump to victory.

How did Trump win when many of his core positions were so unpopular? Some people voted for him regardless of that. Among those who favored giving illegal immigrants a chance to apply for legal status, one in three voted for Trump. Thirty-five percent of people who said international trade creates jobs voted for Trump. And even 27 percent of white voters who said they want the next president to change to more liberal policies voted for Trump.

The Democratic Party has been the Establishment for eight years, and the Clintons have arguably been the Establishment for 24 years. Since the late 1990s, members of the white working class with high school or less have seen their life-chances radically decline, even to the point where they are dying at much higher rates than they have a right to expect.

A year ago Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton University economists, published a study with the startling finding that since 1999 death rates have been going up for white Americans aged 45-54. It is even worse than it sounds, since death rates were declining for the general population.

We have to return to our base. This is my biggest takeaway from last night. I’ve been reading a lot of comments from our side about how dumb Americans are and how they are all racists and misogynists. It’s all said in the most condescending tone. While some of that may be true, we need to lose that. To be frank, we on the left have forgotten a large chunk of our base — white, working class people. Look at the numbers. The same amount of Republicans showed up last night as in 2008 and 2012 — about 59 million. But, on the left, 5m fewer voters than 2012 and 10m fewer than in 2008 showed up. We lost the entire rust belt (Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania). Let that sink in. States we EASILY won in 2008 and 2012. It’s not because the racists and pussy grabbers suddenly showed up. There wasn’t some great turnout on their side — they got the EXACT same votes they always have. Think about it — we lost these states by about 600,000 votes total. That’s it. OUR side in these states didn’t show up. That’s the simple truth. And, to be clear, they didn’t show up because we had nothing for them. We really need to be introspective at this point and acknowledge that. Bernie wasn’t wrong about this. Michael Moore wasn’t wrong about this. Our party was built on the backs of working class people. We got outflanked and took our base for granted. We all have fears. One of the most primal is putting bread on the table and having a roof over our heads. What did we have to allay those anxieties? In the absence of a real plan that addressed what these voters were feeling, hatred and division was allowed to fill the void.

Trump made gains among blacks. He made big among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Some people believe the Number of the Beast is 616. See Number of the Beast - Wikipedia: "The Number of the Beast (Greek: Ἀριθμὸς τοῦ θηρίου, Arithmos tou Thēriou) is a term in the Book of Revelation, of the New Testament, that is associated with the Beast of Revelation in chapter 13.[1] In most manuscripts of the New Testament and in English translations of the Bible, the number of the beast is 666. In critical editions of the Greek text, such as the Novum Testamentum Graece, it is noted that 616 is a variant.[2]"

Speaking at the Iowa Freedom Summit in January, Trump said ObamaCare is a catastrophe that must be repealed and replaced. In 2011, Trump suggested that the health insurance industry have more ability to cross state lines. In "The America We Deserve" Trump wrote that he supported universal healthcare and a system that would mirror Canada's government-run healthcare service.

No, this does not mean you shouldn't be concerned. You should be ready to fight for what matters. The first thing is to join the ACLU if you haven't, because they are always on the frontlines of protecting our rights. The second is to start learning how to strengthen the institutions that your state currently has for low-income people. Then do what you can to support an organization that's working to promote universal health care for everyone.

The first fight for universal health care has already been won: the polls show most Americans want it. It's much of the reason Sanders' popularity cut across party lines. Now we have to make our politicians give it to us.

And if you're depressed, talk to a friend. Talk to a suicide-prevention organization. I won't say there are always reasons to keep living because I believe we should have the right to die when we're ready, but I will say there usually are good reasons to keep going another day, and you need to remember that not seeing them now doesn't mean you won't see them later.

I just saw someone on Facebook say he didn't like the phrase and thought it was used by people who could not defend their position. I'm a great fan of the phrase. I use it when I choose to be merciful, which is more often than my readers may realize. I would prefer to have brambles in my view than scorched earth.

One meaning of the phrase is "you are not worth my time."

But the more common meaning is "I will tolerate this foolishness of yours because you are worth my time despite it."

Agreeing to disagree is at the heart of civility. It's also at the heart of being an ally, not in the sense that's used by cultists who think allies must think alike, but in the sense used by practical people: despite our disagreement, we can work together.

Ultimately, it's a mark of both maturity and liberty. It means you are sufficiently secure in your own belief that you do not need everyone around you to validate it, and because you want to be free to believe what you choose, you support the right of others to believe what they choose.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Exit poll voters were asked whether most illegal immigrants working in the U.S. should be offered a chance to apply for legal status or deported to the country they came from. Fully 7 of 10 voters said they should be allowed to apply for legal status. Similarly, more people opposed building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico than supported it. And virtually as many voters (38 percent) said trade with other countries creates more U.S. jobs as said it takes away jobs (42 percent).

How did Trump win when many of his core positions were so unpopular? Some people voted for him regardless of that. Among those who favored giving illegal immigrants a chance to apply for legal status, one in three voted for Trump. Thirty-five percent of people who said international trade creates jobs voted for Trump. And even 27 percent of white voters who said they want the next president to change to more liberal policies voted for Trump.

I italicized the most fascinating fact there. It may be the greatest reason why the polls consistently showed Sanders trouncing Trump. Everyone who was paying attention knew Clinton was only promising to keep on the neoliberal course.

A poll released today by the Public Religion Research Institute found 72 percent of Americans now favor passing laws to protect lesbian, gay and transgender people from discrimination, including three-quarters of Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans. A majority of Americans also oppose so-called “bathroom bills,” which require transgender people to use the restrooms that correspond to their sex at birth.

Not voting is acquiescence—the only way to protest is to register your choice.

As a third-party voter in a blue state, I didn't have to decide whether I should support a lesser evil, but I was still torn. I worked with Dan Vacek when I ran for governor with the Grassroots Party and I liked him, but of the parties that were sufficiently organized to get on the ballot, the Green's platform is closest to what I believe. So I did what anyone who values democracy should do and flipped a coin. Jill Stein won. That pleased me. I ended up voting for the Susan B. Anthony candidate.

Clinton fans are doing their best to appropriate Anthony, but here are a few quotes that suggest Anthony would've preferred Sanders and Stein.

on public education

"If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals."

on unions

"Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work."

on imperialism

"I really believe I shall explode if some of you young women don’t wake up — and raise your voice in protest against the impending crime of this nation upon the new islands it has clutched from other folks — Do come into the living present & work to save us from any more barbaric male governments."

Down-ballot, I went with Democrats and the tax raise for our schools. Minnesota's Democratic Party fused with the Farmer Labor Party long ago, and while much of the spirit of the FL has been lost, there's enough to make this a good state.

PS. Yes, that is a Captain America hoodie. He grew up a working class guy in New York during the Depression—he was either a Roosevelt Democrat or a red. There are two kinds of patriotism. I believe in the kind that says when you love the place you live, you work to make it better.

The problem with anti-racism campaigns is that there is no clearly understood or agreed method of changing people's prejudices, values, attitudes or behaviour. What is known is that direct confrontation is likely to be counter-productive. ... In 1997 the Council of Europe coordinated a year of anti-racism campaigns and activities throughout Europe. A survey at the end of the year, conducted in European Union countries by the polling organisation Eurobarometer, found that rather than a decline in racism, it had been marked by a growing willingness on the part of Europeans to openly declare themselves as racist.

Do people who undergo training usually shed their biases? Researchers have been examining that question since before World War II, in nearly a thousand studies. It turns out that while people are easily taught to respond correctly to a questionnaire about bias, they soon forget the right answers. The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash.

That report includes a fact my father told me about when I was a boy:

Evidence that contact between groups can lessen bias first came to light in an unplanned experiment on the European front during World War II. The U.S. army was still segregated, and only whites served in combat roles. High casualties left General Dwight Eisenhower understaffed, and he asked for black volunteers for combat duty. When Harvard sociologist Samuel Stouffer, on leave at the War Department, surveyed troops on their racial attitudes, he found that whites whose companies had been joined by black platoons showed dramatically lower racial animus and greater willingness to work alongside blacks than those whose companies remained segregated. Stouffer concluded that whites fighting alongside blacks came to see them as soldiers like themselves first and foremost. The key, for Stouffer, was that whites and blacks had to be working toward a common goal as equals—hundreds of years of close contact during and after slavery hadn’t dampened bias.

The same effect has been observed time and time again in labor struggles: nothing unites us like the sense we're working together to make a better world for everyone.

The Clinton camp knew they had to do two things if they hoped to win the Presidency. The first was to defeat Sanders, which they managed to do because their base didn't care that Sanders did better with independents and cut deeply into Trump's base with his economic policies. The second was to run against someone Clinton had a chance of beating, which they did by promoting Trump.

It'll be interesting to see how the Clinton camp's calculations pay off on Tuesday. If she loses, I won't feel bad for her supporters—they'll have their second choice. I'll only feel bad for the rest of us.

Minnesota is a blue state. I don't have to wonder if I should vote for Clinton. I'll flip a coin before I go into the booth, then vote for Jill Stein because her platform is closest to mine or for Dan Vacek because I liked him when I ran for governor on the Grassroots Party ticket.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

The boy in me is happy: his two favorite comic book characters have had good movies made about them. I say "comic book characters" instead of superheroes because unlike Captain America, Dr. Strange isn't a super hero; he comes from the pulp tradition of the mystic guardian. The movie gets that well enough that the few mentions of other characters from the Marvel universe threw me a little; the movie isn't hurt by them, but I would've cut them.

Cumberbatch was not my first choice for the role—I had a long list that included actors of all races and genders—but he's an excellent choice. He's not playing Sherlock Holmes, but he is playing a smart and arrogant man, which he does very well. And the fanboy in me thinks he looks perfect. (Emma especially appreciated the shaving scene.)

Swinton does a fine job, but I would've gone with Michelle Yeoh for the Ancient One.

Benedict Wong is great as Wong.

The cape of levitation nearly steals the movie.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, one of my favorite actors, has a nice character arc. As do most of the characters—almost everyone we meet is a bit different by the end of the movie.

If the trailers disappointed you a bit, as they did me, with no apparent Ditkoesque supernatural dimensions, be reassured.

The tone becomes lighter in the second half of the movie, which may indicate the work of the second team of writers. I would've minded that more if the funny bits hadn't worked, but they work very well.

Fanboy Will gives it 9 out of 10 stars. Film critic Will gives it 7.5. It is not a great movie, but it's a very good example of "If you like this sort of thing, you'll like this." And I do.